


Just Twelve Minutes... An Eternity

by SilenceLeaflin



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24938890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilenceLeaflin/pseuds/SilenceLeaflin
Summary: Wanda Maximoff lives through the first twelve minutes after the soul-jarring death of her brother, Pietro, consumed by feeling his death alongside him and struggling to comprehend the loss of someone so integral to her life.
Relationships: Pietro Maximoff & Wanda Maximoff
Kudos: 9





	Just Twelve Minutes... An Eternity

**Author's Note:**

> (This small one-shot ficlet was inspired by a beautiful and heartbreaking idea originally mentioned by jademage13 on Tumblr. It involves the thoughts and feelings of Wanda Maximoff immediately following the death of her brother, Pietro, near the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron.)
> 
> (Trigger Warnings: death of a loved one, descriptions of wounds, grief, dissociation, stress, anxiety)

Wanda didn’t remember when she had begun to count, or how she arrived at the number once she became aware of it, but it was somewhere around two minutes when she realized she was counting each and every second. Her chest ached. Her heart pounded. Her head ached. An electrical charge sensation sparked through her body as her powers reacted to her volatile emotions. They continued to misfire in small bursts around her following the initial wave of devastating energy that emanated from her when... _when he left this earth._

She had died with him in that moment, or at the very least she had felt what he felt, and the loss had left her feeling no longer connected to this world. Every bullet that tore through his body in reality tore through hers with phantom cruelty, her body unharmed but her mind shocked by the agony. She felt blood in her lungs that wasn't there, and the impact of a fall as she felt her body strike the earth though it still stood, her knees finally giving out as she felt all this from him. Her heart beat erratically for a moment, skipping and thumping as if it, too, was stopping, just like his. It took her breath away, quite literally. And then... the horrible feeling of sinking down into cold and darkness, an unwelcome heaviness of mind and body not unlike the unnatural sleep of being tranquilized, the warmth and awareness of this world leaving her as he left. Wanda screamed as she felt herself return to this world without him, their bond severed against her will... and _his as well_ , she assumed. But she could not hear her own scream. Silence and a tingly sort of discomfort set in as her magic ripped through her surroundings, a visual and energetic representation and side effect of the destruction of half her soul.

It wasn’t until Pietro left that Wanda realized she had never known _true solitude_ before. At four minutes she stood in silence, the wrecked mechanical carcasses of Stark’s hijacked robots lying all around her, pondering in her shock this disjointed and surreal feeling of being _utterly alone_. Everything Pietro was to her, everything that held her together like emotional glue - his warmth, his smile, his laugh, his familiar scent, even his bad jokes - were nothing compared to all the things she never _realized_ he was to her... whatever had been there with her while he lived that now left only a dark, frozen void behind. Pietro’s absence was like a phantom limb for her soul, gone and beyond her reach but no less painful, so easily remembered as having been there just a short, desperate time ago. It was a surreal existence for her. _Unwanted._

At six minutes her feet carried her from the scene of her destruction, the shrapnel crunching loudly underneath her boots as Wanda let her senses bring her closer to her brother’s murderer. Her eyes guided her but they did not really see. Her heart kept beating although she didn’t understand why. Life should have _stopped_. It should not have been _possible without_ him, not when everything she was and everything she would become, she was so sure, had always included _him_. Seven minutes now... since Pietro and Wanda Maximoff died but a strange hollow girl continued in place of the latter, a shattered shell still left walking the earth despite having the foundation of her life destroyed like a cruel carpet yanked out from underneath her already unsteady feet.

It was nine minutes and then some when her hearing returned to her and the ringing stopped, and that’s when she realized she was crying. Her tears made streaks in the dirt and pain written on her face, accentuated like the darkened, angry strokes of a discontented painter against her flushed skin. The wind whipped her long hair, seeming to join her in her rage and despair with each protesting gust. It was ten minutes now. Ten _long, impossible minutes_... since her heart was torn from her chest and her soul split in two. Life had stopped for her., if not for the rest of the world. If it ever began again, it would be different, new... _wrong. So very wrong._ And yet it continued around her as if nothing at all had happened... as if in insult to the ruins of the beauty that had been Wanda and Pietro's close and unbreakable bond.

_Eleven minutes._ The seconds ticked on as she counted each one in her head, sometimes matching them to her paces through the dusty rubble of Sokovia. Ultron was close now, she could _feel_ him... and by the time she’d found him, she intended to do _so much more to him_ than just sense his presence. Eleven minutes and counting. Ticking onward much too fast for her liking. How dare time continue on through this _injustice_ , this _agonizing loss? Fifty-seven... Fifty-eight... Fifty nine..._

_Twelve minutes._

Ultron was there... _right there!_... and _oh_ , she would deal with him in a moment, but... for the time being Wanda’s feet stopped. _Twelve minutes._ She had counted every second. It was real. It was _all too real_. And time marched on still... without him. Slowly, her eyes closed, pushing out tears and sending them trickling down her cheeks, her bottom lip quivering with the grief that threatened to break her beyond repair. With her mind she sent her thoughts to Pietro, for wherever he was now, spoken words would no longer reach him.

_I am older than you now, brother._

_Too old..._


End file.
